Yesterday I came across an article on Hacker News about Hexo, a blogging platform for Node.js ala Jekyll/Octopress.

It immediately caught my eye because I had a nasty time trying to setup Octopress the other day. To be fair, it's not its fault, Windows is not a very Ruby-friendly environment. And they are both somewhat similar.

With both you can:

• Write posts in Markdown.
• Compile them to static files.
• Theme your blog.
• etc.

And best of all, at least for me, since it's running on Node.js, it is cross-platform and works on Windows (yay). So I gave it a try.

To create a new post:

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hexo new post "My post title"

To generate HTML:

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hexo generate

To watch files for changes (and generate):

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hexo generate -w

To launch a server to look at the results.

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hexo server

Note: Once the server has been launched, it looks like it won't pick up any changes you do, you'll have to relaunch it. Bummer, I know. But until this is fixed you can work around it using Grunt and launching your own server with the grunt-contrib-connect plugin.

I migrated all my old posts from my blogger site and I have been editing partials and CSS to make the theme look nicer.

Hopefully it'll get more Octopress plugins migrated and better looking themes.

If you're curious check out the documentation.